A journalist is really just a little kid who wants to be the first one to run down the street and say, "Guess what I know?"

Walt Mossberg: I guess it must have been '64 and '65, they started this experiment. And they gave . . . They provided space for a column for every high school in their metro area. And it was not a democratic process. The English department or the principal or somebody in all these high schools appointed the columnists. And in my case, out of the blue they asked me to do it. And they asked me to do it together with the guy who was, at the time, my best friend in high school. And it's somebody whose name is now well known. It's James Woods, the Hollywood actor who went to high school with me. And he and I started to write this little column together. It was a completely uncontroversial column. All of them were. It was just like what was going on at the school; but not really what was going on. It was sort of officially what was going on. And he was then and now very interested in acting. So he dropped out of doing this after about a month and I kept it up on my own. And at the end . . . And I got bitten by the bug of journalism. I mean I think that, you know, if you're a journalist your job is to question authority. And certainly the entire political climate in which I grew up, culminating really in Watergate, by which time I already was a journalist. But I mean that whole feeling that the government and authority could not be wholly trusted, that there was something noble about questioning authority played heavily into my attraction to journalism, yes.
 
Recorded on: 9/13/07